Eddie Rosner Revival, Take Two

Paris: Born Adolph and also known as Adi, Eddy and the "White Louis
Armstrong," Eddie Rosner was acclaimed first in Berlin and then in Warsaw
before being chased out by the Nazis. "It didn't help being a Jew playing
Negro music," he said: "Even if your name was Adolph." He fled to the USSR,
where he became a star, a convict, and eventually a deserter.
An Eddie Rosner revival is underway.

A memorial concert on December 14 at Moscow's prestigious Tchaikowsky
Hall was described (on the telephone from the Russian capital) by its
producer Alexey Batashev as a, "glittering event. The legendary Eddie
Rosner Jazz Orchestra triumphantly played his famous hits of '30s and '40s.
All the Rosner legacy was scattered and exterminated. His name was
forbidden twice in Soviet Union. Even now, it is still concealed, slurred
over, veiled, hushed-up. No scores nowhere could be found. We had them
transcribed from old 78s. This is first authentic ghost-band in Russia,
like Glenn Miller and Count Basie."

Entrepreneur, historian, broadcast media host and founder of the Moscow
Jazz Club, Batashev started the Rosner revival in the early '90s when he
dedicated a festival in Kazakhstan to the trumpeter's wife, who had been
exiled there under Stalin. It was followed by tributes in Moscow, and on
Radio Free Europe, and last year Pierre-Henri Salfati's documentary film,
"A Jazzman From The Gulag," won awards on the festival circuit.

Born in Berlin in 1910, Rosner was a teenage classical trumpet virtuoso
before joining the successful German hot-jazz band Weintraub's Syncopators
in 1930. His rare talent was quickly rewarded. When the Nazis took power,
he was touring Western Europe with his own band. After his application for
a Belgian residence permit was turned down, he moved to Krakow and then
Warsaw. Between 1933-1939 his 13-piece Polish swing band, described in
Salfati's documentary as "wildly popular," was held over for lengthy
engagements in nightclubs like Gold and Peterburgski. They concertized in
Monte Carlo, Benelux and Scandinavia, and shared a bill with Maurice
Chevalier at the ABC Theater in Paris. He opened his own club Chez Adi in
Lodz.

Rosner hired the best players and arrangers available. It was a swinging
band and he was taken seriously as an improviser. Physically, he resembled
a Continental version of Xavier Cugat and wore a matinee-idol pencil
moustache like his hero Harry James. He corresponded at length with Gene
Krupa. It was said that he learned to speak English like a New York taxi
driver. American musicians he had met invited him over but he thought his
future lay in Europe. Touring Italy in 1934, his band crossed Louis
Armstrong's, and there was a trumpet "cutting contest." (Armstrong won.)
Afterwards they exchanged publicity photos dedicated, in turn, to the
"White Louis Armstrong" and the "Black Eddie Rosner."

When the Germans occupied Poland, he fled once more. He and his young
Polish wife, singer Ruth Kaminska, escaped first to Soviet-occupied
Byalistock and then Lvov. The orchestra he formed this time was heard and
admired by Pantelomon Panomorenko, First Secretary of the Belorussian
Communist Party, a jazz fan. In his excellent book "Red Hot - The Fate of
Jazz In The Soviet Union," S. Frederick Starr explains what happened next:
"Arriving with his bodyguards at Rosner's dressing room after a performance
in Minsk, [Panomorenko] proposed that the newly arrived band be named the
State Jazz Orchestra of the Belorussian Republic."

The trumpeter was named "Honored Artist" of that Republic. After his band
gave a command performance in what appeared to be an empty theater,
Rosner's manager received a message that Stalin, who had been in the
balcony, liked it.

During World War II, "Stalin's band" (led by a German Jew, remember) toured
the Soviet Union from Armenia to Siberia in their own railroad sleeping car
to play for the armed forces and party apparatchiks. From time to time they
rode flatbed trucks and tanks to the front lines. Rosner earned as much as
100,000 rubles a year (an average
worker earned about 2,000.) The Rosners were given the use of a four-room
apartment furnished with Afghan carpets and a grand piano opposite the
Kremlin.

According to S. Frederick Starr in his history Jazz Red and Hot: "It
is doubtful that any jazz musician on earth has ever been recompensed more
generously within his society than Eddie Rosner in the Soviet Union during
wartime." His band played standards
like "On The Sentimental Side" and "Midnight in Harlem." Two men in a
camel-costume would cross the stage during Juan Tizol's "Caravan." Rosner was
a survivor in more ways than one.

Then the wind changed and it all disappeared. After the war, he was
arrested for peddling decadent, depraved capitalist music and sent to
Siberia. The camp commander, a fan ever since hearing an exceptional Rosner
concert in Omsk, allowed him to form an inmate band. Rosner recouped some
of his veteran sidemen and taught other prisoners how to play jazz.
Sometimes they made their own instruments. His new orchestra was on the
road performing for guards and officials at camps throughout the Gulag
until he was freed in 1954, after Stalin died.

In Moscow, he built a 64 piece ensemble which became one of the most
popular variety acts in the USSR. But the joy had gone out of it, one
setback followed another. He was increasingly unhappy, bitter and
frustrated. His name dropped into a second Soviet memory-hole when he
decided to return home to Berlin, where he died poor and forgotten in 1976.

I saw a documentary on the life of Eddie Rosner last Sunday on the Australian ABC network. He was certainly a gifted Jazz musician. What a shame the USSR of the day expunged whatever of his works that they could find. My question is this - is there any surviving recordings of Eddie Rosner and any of his bands - that have been transcribed to CD? Please state Title, Recording Company and Recording/Order number. Thanks - Paul Spresser